Fund performance

Market Outlook

Albany District Attorney David Soares has done an about-face and has told New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno that ex-governor Eliot Spitzer’s alleged involvement in an investigation into Bruno’s whereabouts was absolutely, positively Spitzer’s orders, according to reports over the weekend.

BOSTON—With auction rate securities in question, Evergreen Investments’ equity managers are now earnestly looking for alternate sources of liquidity, the firm announced in a conference call late yesterday.

The price of crude oil and gold fell nearly 10% in less than 36 hours on Wednesday and Thursday, backfiring on investors who were using commodities as a hedge against inflation.

The majority of economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal say the U.S. has finally slid into a recession.

Chinese mutual funds posted moderate gains in February after declining more than seven percent in January, according to a recent report.

Global alternative asset manager Blackstone Group reported a 90% drop in profit during the fourth quarter of 2007 compared to the same period in 2006 and warned that conditions will remain difficult for the rest of the year or longer.

TrimTabs Investment Research said the U.S. economy lost 78,000 jobs in February, based on daily income tax deposits to the Treasury from salaried taxpayers. This number is higher than estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported 63,000 job losses in the same period.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett has trumped Bill Gates as the world’s richest person, according to Forbes magazine.

The retail brokerage unit of Bank of America announced it will be cutting the salaries of low-producing brokers and raising those of top performers in an effort to chase wealthier clientele, according to the Dow Jones News Service.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday that more needs to be done to help troubled homeowners, and suggested a broader effort to writedown the principal on some troubled loans, according to Dow Jones.

The Dow Jones industrials dropped more than 100 point immediately after the opening bell on Friday and continued to fall through out the day, ending down more than 300 points.

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae has posted a $3.55 billion loss for the last quarter of 2007, blaming rising home loan defaults.

The U.S. economy is like a zebra that has stumbled into a spot of quicksand. The more it struggles, the faster it will sink, but if the zebra can be patient, help may come along sooner than it knows.

The Bush Administration and the Congress may bail out the nearly 8.8 million people whose mortgages have ballooned due to the subprime crisis.

restructuring

A pair of senior executives of the U.S. asset management business of Julius Baer, the Swiss wealth business, earned compensation packages worth $120 million in the first nine months of 2007, according to a regulatory filing ahead of the unit's flotation planned for this year.

Morgan Stanley is eliminating 1,000 jobs as it scales back its residential mortgage operations in the U.S. and closes operations in the U.K., Reuters reports, citing Morgan Stanley information. More than 100 other mortgage lenders have cut jobs in the last year as the housing crisis worsens.

On Monday, Fidelity Investments announced total brokerage client assets had reached a record $1.99 trillion in the fourth quarter, a 17% increase from a year ago.

A record 15,594 new equity trade ideas were entered into the Repository and Distribution Centre in January 2008, up 152% from 6,191 ideas entered last January.